Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

OF NOMINATIVES AND DATIVES 497

from which regularly there are alternative types of further developments,
and that are the very same formal case-markings as appear in the "kernel"
inflection with nominative/absolutive vs. dative value, or their nearest pos­
sible equivalents in terms of the minimal inflectional schema of the non-
neutralized syntactic scheme. It is in this sense, entirely akin to the notion
of "foci" in phonology-phonetics and lexicalization of denotata, that these
case-markings, the nominative/absolutive and dative, anchor the systems of
possible languages along all the dimensions relevant to our argument, from
discourse-based coreference and linkage phenomena, through proposi-
tional regimentation and inherent noun phrase denotational content. With­
out the anchoring of such a formal-functional hypothesis, complicated as it
ultimately is, syntax, and indeed all of grammar, merely floats in a sea of
speculation and ingenious formal tricks.

*Explanatory note

This paper was prepared for delivery at the Department of Linguistics of the University

of Amsterdam on 19 December 1980, while I was a Visiting Fellow of the Max-Planck-

Institut für Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen. I am grateful both for the invitation and for

the leisure to draft the paper at that time, at least partly in response to Alan Rumsey's

stimulating questions at Language 56.672 (1980). The paper was presented again at the

Department of Linguistics (Arts) of the Australian National University on 12 August

1981, at which time Igor Mel'cuk provided stimulating criticism from his perspective,

and a third time at the monthly meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society of 1 June

1982, when my colleague Jerrold Sadock responded to several points.

I am, of course, somewhat embarrassed at publishing this much-circulated type­

script so many years after the fact, and am thereby all the more grateful to the editor of

this volume, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr, for making this publication space available, for

immeasureably generous devotion of his own time to the physical transduction of text

and apparatus, and for at least publicly serene editorial patience, Though the theory and

exposition are historically and logically independent of Role and Reference Grammar,

I appreciate his kindness in displaying its substantive connection to this line of research.

References

Berlin, Brent & Paul Kay. 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.

Berkeley & Los Angeles: Unviersity of California Press.

Boas, Franz. 1911. "Chinook". Handbook of American Indian Languages, ed. F. Boas,

vol. 1, pp. 559-677. BAE-B 40, pt. 1.